In February 2013, we received a generous grant from CreativeBC to build an interactive installation based on Vancouver’s Open Data Initiative. Our original timeline started in May and ran until the end of August, but this plan was offset by the client work I had to complete in the first couple weeks I was working at Slant. After a few days off, I was back in the office and ready to start working on the project.

We didn’t have a strong grasp on all the data that was available to us. To help us get on track, we started having some meetings with our friend Mahir, who is a great dataviz designer. We also wanted to get in touch with the people organizing the archive of data available from the city, so we did that too. We looked at data, dug around a bit, but at the end of the day we didn’t really have a clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish with the data and as a result the project got off to a slow start.

After about a month, we’d had a meeting with some representatives from the city. We added a bunch of comments to our basecamp project, but afterward the project basically went silent until the end of June.

Open-Endedness

It’s a rare and beautiful thing to have a project where you decide all the shots — no clients to deal with, no outside opinions, no external constraints. But, at the same time a completely open-ended project brings with it decisions that have to be balanced properly with your desire for success. And, if that desire for success is high, then making the right decision can be a difficult one.

For example, we wanted to balance a few things:

1. We wanted to create something new, not just a piece of tech that fulfilled the requirements of the grant.
2. We wanted to tell a compelling story.
3. We wanted to make the installation beautiful.
4. We wanted to use some cutting-edge software that allowed us to create an intriguing and seamless user experience.
5. We wanted the project to be more than just an interactive map.

Right, so that list seems short with only 5 reasonable constraints. But, there were a few realities that proved to be… annoying.

First, our original idea of tracing where the city’s spending was going ran into a wall. We originally had the idea of “where does my money go?” by giving the installation the perspective of answering a citizen’s interest in knowing how their taxes, fees, and other things get spent by the city. The wall was the realization that there just isn’t enough to build a compelling story, there were some documents outlining spending but nothing that told a good story and certainly far from enough make a foundation for real data analysis.

Second, most of the data was map data.

Third, our vision for the project became unclear.